Review of Building a Ruin. The Cold War Politics of Soviet Economic Reform by Yakov Feygin (Harvard University Press, 2024).
It is now some three and a half decades since the Soviet Union collapsed. But its past continues to haunt the Left, and its experience helps to define the “short twentieth century” from 1917 to 1989–91.
Between 1917 to 1953, the territory that we think of as the Soviet Union experienced a succession of crises. Revolution and civil war gave way to a period of stability under the New Economic Policy, before the experience of collectivization and industrialization, mass repression, and Nazi invasion during the 1930s and ’40s. After victory in the war, there was a new wave of repression as Joseph Stalin became more paranoid in the final years of his rule.
But throughout this period, it was still being driven forward. Under the rule of Stalin, as Isaac Deutscher famously put it, the USSR made the transition from “a Russia working with the wooden plow” to become a land “equipped with atomic piles.” Thereafter it settled into a more peaceful pattern of development as the main enemy of the West in the Cold War.
A new generation of historians are now investigating its past. Yakov Feygin is among them. His work Building a Ruin: The Cold War Politics of Soviet Economic Reform examines the tortuous economic debates that took place after the death of Stalin. At the center of these debates, Feygin writes, was a search for “a better, more flexible economic system” that could begin to deliver “both guns and butter.”
Feygin draws on archival material that was not available to those of us old enough to have watched some of these events from afar. He also casts the Soviet experience in a much wider framework. Building a Ruin makes use of Charles Maier’s idea that Western governments responded to the international crisis created by the Russian Revolution and the new conditions that took shape after 1945 by looking to a technocratic…
Auteur: Mike Haynes
